The Romantic Period

 

The Romantic Period

The last decades of the eighteenth century witnessed a series of events that was to have an indelible impression on literature —the American Revolution (1776-83), the French Revolution (1789-83) and the Industrial Revolution marked by the invention of the steam engine. In literature, the changes were discernible, with a new emphasis on the creative imagination, on feeling, on the power of nature and the picturesque, and a fascination for the geography and history of the world. New energies permeated the world of literature, and the Romantic mind probed the various levels of feeling in external as well as human nature, in national folklore representing the spirit of the people.

 

Before detailing the characteristics of the Romantic movement in English literature, the extent of the impact of the two revolutions—the French and the Industrial—should be assessed.

 

The Background

 

The French Revolution of 1789 was, intrinsically, a reaction of poverty against privilege. The French monarchy underLouis XIV (1643-1715) had reached its pinnacle of glory, but certain inherent flaws in the state machinery were festering,which were multiplied and magnified during the reigns of his successors. The reign of Louis XV (1715-74) was markedby a series of disastrous wars which depleted the French treasury and divided the country. When Louis XVI became themonarch in 1774, there was widespread resentment on the part of the peasants towards the aristocracy and the clergy. Thefinest minds in France were unanimous in their criticism of the existing order, and they urged the adoption of constitutional reforms —as exemplified by England. The Revolution was a direct consequence of the powerful ideas propagated by intellectuals such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), Voltaire (1694-1778) and Turgot (1727-81), and other social philosophers of the age. Rousseau believed in the natural goodness of mankind and he put forward a theory of the state in which sovereignty would rest in the general will of the whole nation. The popular slogan of the Revolution was 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity' — the thinkers sought abolish the French monarchy and to reduce forever the rigid class divisions of French society.

 

The situation snowballed in the late 1780s, when France faced an acute financial crisis. The king desperately tried, in 1787, to impose taxes on the privileged classes, who refused to pay. The following year saw matters worsen because of a failed harvest and a bitter winter, thus intensifying the miseries of the poor. Louis XVI's inadequate measures failed to appease the suffering common people and he had to bow down to pressure and summon the States General at Versailles, on May 5, 1789, a representative assembly of the three estates or orders of the realm, that had not met since 1614. The Church was the First Estate; the aristocracy was the Second Estate and Third Estate represented not only peasants, but also a growing middle class that was frustrated by its lack of political power. They clamoured for major social and political reforms, far exceeding the king's immediate financial objectives. By 20 June, the deputies of the Third Estate proclaimed themselves the National Assembly and pledged not to disband until France had been given a constitution. Louis XVI legalised the National Assembly one week later, but two grave tactical errors on his part, one the summoning of troops to Versailles, and second, the dismissal of his popular finance minister Jacques Necker, sparked off an uprising in Paris, and led to the storming of the famous ancient French prison, the Bastille, on 14 July 1789. A mob attacked this prison because it was seen as the symbol of the king's absolute power. This event was followed by outbursts of rioting throughout France, as peasants pillaged and burned aristocratic homes. The French royal family was removed from Versailles to Paris in October. The King was brought to trial in December 1792, and executed on 21 January 1793. Subsequently, anarchic conditions prevailed; an emergency government was formed, and the period which has come to be known as the inglorious Reign of Terror in France began, lasting from June 1793 to July 1794, when thousands of people were executed throughout France. The fall of Robespierre on 27 July 1794, wrought the end of the Terror. However, disillusionment followed and crushed the hopes of political freedom, social justice and individual liberty, and France veered from one crisis to the other. Order was restored by the young Napoleon Bonaparte when he returned to France as a national hero from his brilliant campaign in Egypt in 1799, but this also put an end to France's dreams of democracy.

 

The consequences of the French Revolution were not confined to France alone. In England, the Romantic period in literature coincided with the Revolution, and English literature, politics, as well as the education system were influenced by it. Rousseau's doctrine of humanism— professing equal rights in social, political and economic fields to all men—found a universal response in England. England had already achieved sovereignty of the elected representatives of the people in its Parliament, in 1688. The Whigs and the Tories were divided in their reaction to the Revolution, and it was only when England was threatened by Napoleon, that these two political parties united to oppose the French aggression.

 

Literature in England was greatly impacted by the Revolution. Edmund Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, which became one of the most eloquent documents of English political thought. Thomas Paine (1737- 1809) answered him with The Rights of Man (1791), and the younger intellectuals of the age sided with the latter's views. The older generation of English Romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey— were imbued with revolutionary ideals. Wordsworth declared in The Prelude, 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive'. Southey and Coleridge were inspired by the Revolution to plan an ideal communist society which they named 'Pantisocracy', and Coleridge dedicated an Ode to France. The radical political thinker William Godwin (1756- 1836) published Political Justice (1793), advocating a gradual evolution towards the removal of poverty and the equal distribution of all wealth. It is another matter that these very writers, so enthused by the ideals of the French Revolution, later expressed their disillusionment and disenchantment with the tragic outcome of the political strife in France. The younger generation of poets—Byron and Shelley— wrote verses of protest against the forces of tyranny and exploitation unleashed by the Revolution. Despite its failure to live up to the expectations of the sensitive minds of Europe, the French Revolution engendered the humanistic spirit which inspired the bulk of Romantic poetry.

 

The French Revolution can thus be taken as a significant historical catalyst that shook Europe to its depths, and it had a far-reaching influence on all literary works of the time. Literature, as we know, is always affected by social trends, religious practices and political upheavals. The fall of the Bastille was widely accepted as a symbol of the regeneration and progress of the common people throughout Europe. In verse and prose, this note of optimism was profusely expressed, energising young minds. Of course, this promise became blighted and the movement turned out to be a bitter trauma for many. The incessant wars that followed till 1815 sapped France's resources completely. The fall of Napoleon at Waterloo became a decisive landmark for the younger generation of poets and writers like Byron, Shelley and Keats, as the fall of the Bastille had been for Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge.

 

During the last decades of the eighteenth century, alongside the social and political ferment, the Industrial Revolution took place, which transformed England from a primarily rural and agricultural country into a predominantly urban and manufacturing one, by the middle of the nineteenth century. This revolution catapulted Britain to dizzying heights and established the British Empire as the uncontested and undisputed leader of the modem world. The concept of the free market propagated by the economist Adam Smith (1723-90) in his Wealth of Nations (1776) captured the popular imagination, and a gradual shift in the balance of power became evident, changing hands from the feudal land-holding aristocracy to the new doyens of industry. With rapid industrial growth, improved methods of cultivation were employed, which freed a major portion of the labourers who became available for employment in the factories. This new class of industrial workers came to be known as the 'working class' which became concentrated in the urban areas. The invention of the steam engine by James Watt, in 1769, revolutionised the textile industry, which became England's flagship industry. It was further strengthened by the invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay in 1733 and especially by the spinning jenny invented by James Hargreaves in 1764 and refined by Richard Arkwright in 1769. Means of communication were extensively developed and canals, roads and bridges were built with innovative methods. The invention of the steam rail locomotive by George Stephenson in 1814 led to the establishment of a network of railways criss-crossing the country by 1850. This development of rail transport became the hallmark of the Industrial Revolution, leading to the rapid growth of the midland and northern industrial towns. The British Parliament contributed to these years of industrial growth by promoting and aiding the needs of a growing economy. Political support and a rapidly growing domestic and foreign market facilitated the spread of the Industrial Revolution.

 

The downside of such phenomenal industrial growth was equally evident. The whole social and economic landscape of the country changed. With modem industrial techniques being deployed, fewer labourers were needed to work the land and large numbers of the working class converged in the cities, seeking employment. Unemployment became rampant, as the factories became increasingly mechanised, resulting in poverty. The country was divided into two classes—the wealthy and the poor. The decline in infant mortality and increased Irish immigration added to the population, especially in London, and living conditions became pitiable. The repeal of the income tax in 1816, coupled with decreased trade and indirect taxes, depleted the national coffers. The economic depression of 1819 signified the nadir of the plight of the common Englishman who was brimming over with antipathy and discontent. The seamier side of the Industrial Revolution became more apparent in the subsequent Victorian era. 

 

Romanticism in English Literature

 

The eighteenth-century sensibility had considered the universe as 'an ordered garden' (Alexander Pope) and the poet as an accomplished social artist. The French influence led to an aristocratic literature — urbane and sophisticated—with the metropolis as the centre. As Dr Johnson opined, 'If anyone was tired of London, he was tired of life.' The heroic couplet, structural and rigid, became fashionable, and imagination and fancy were banished. Reason triumphed over emotion. Romantic period marked a departure from such ethos, attitudes and environment. The writers of this age were imbued with Rousseau's dictum that 'man is bom free', and intuition, imagination and a sense of wonder marked the change of guard. As J. B. Priestly commented, 'Reason was lost to romance.'

 

The 43 years from the fall of the Bastille in 1789 to the passing of the first Reform Bill in 1832 precisely cover the period in English literary history from the appearance of William Blake's Songs of Innocence to the death of Sir Walter Scott. Commonly called the 'Romantic period', this phase witnessed the decisive movement away from the cultural authority of classical Rome. The local cultures were rediscovered and celebrated and vernacular literatures were appreciated. The word 'Romantic' derives from the Old French term 'romans' meaning 'a vernacular language descended from Latin'. In Britain, the seeds of Romanticism were sown by poets like Thomas Gray, William Collins and William Cowper, and this new breed of writers went back to indigenous and ethnic sources for inspiration. As a literary movement, Romanticism was to be found in France and Germany, besides England. Hence, critics like A. O. Lovejoy argued that the term should be used in the plural. Many a debate has ensued amongst critics, regarding the nature and character of the term 'Romanticism', a term which remains difficult to define and pin down. At best, we can attempt to grasp its meaning using a number of features that showcase the term in its literary sense.

 

In England, the Romantic period saw changes in philosophy, politics and religion. It was an era of political turmoil, with the American War of Independence, the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Wars. In philosophy, the period saw a strong reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth century. New insights from science changed the existing view of the physical world, and the theories of thinkers such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and Rousseau changed the mental world. The progress of domestic reforms enlarged the boundaries and enriched the content of English Romanticism. The revolutions instilled notions of democracy, and self¬ expression and self-employment became the by-words of the new generation. From Napoleon, the Romantic writers imbibed personal qualities like charisma, disdain for traditional class distinctions, the advocacy of personal merit and an aggressive self¬ confidence. Overall, the artist broke away from the restrictive patterns of the past and charted a new course, infused with feelings and sensation, intellect and energy. The clarion call of the French Revolution— 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity' — thrilled the young writers, and a new literary impulse was bom. Rousseau's doctrine— that man was by nature good, but was corrupted by bad laws and customs, and should therefore be free of them and left to the diktat of his own personality— struck a responsive chord in the hearts of the Romantic writers. Like the great Elizabethan period, the Romantic age is remarkable for yielding so many distinctive voices specialising in different genres.

 

Classical literature was always metropolitan, associated with great cities like Athens, Rome and Alexandria. The English classicists had proudly proclaimed London and Edinburgh as the modem counterparts of the ancient cities. However, the Romantic poets shunned the city—Shelley succinctly remarked, 'Hell is a city much like London.' Wordsworth retreated to the Lake District. The Romantic poets also recognised a new and growing threat in industrialisation. Blake had already denounced the 'satanic mills' and most writers of the age turned to nature as a source of inspiration, experience and setting. The Augustans too had written about the natural world, but they tended to appreciate human beings and nature working together productively. The Romantics saw nature as an entity independent of the human world. For them, human beings needed the help of nature for fulfilment. In nature, they saw beauty and out of beauty came inspiration. Moreover, the Romantic writers' attitude to nature was an attempt on their part to restore a sense of magic and wonder to human responses. Coleridge stated this view when he described Wordsworth's poetic aims in his Biographia Literaria. These were 'to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening Mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.'

 

The Romantic period also denotes the first instance in English literature when writers failed to find solace in Christianity. Some of them even celebrated the glorious excesses of hell. Blake was always contemptuous of traditional religious training, and politically his views were often thought to be treasonable. Shelley was expelled from Oxford for co-authoring a provocative pamphlet- The Necessity of Atheism -and Byron was forced into exile because of his allegedly wild and immoral private life. The more visionary writers drew on traditions like Platonism and Neo¬ Platonism, and began a personal search for the spiritual; many of their writings are built around this search. In this search for spiritual truth, the Romantic writers used two faculties which rationalism tended to discredit—feelings and imagination. Imagination, the peculiar gift of the poet, was now regarded as the most important human faculty. The Romantics regarded human beings as individuals with personal and emotional responses rather than as cogs in a social system. Their real links were with nature and not with an artificially created social existence. Instead of accepting established religious ideas and social norms as the truth, the Romantics sought a more librated concept of truth— one that is based on individual experience, and more significantly, on imagination. Despite their individual differences, all the Romantic poets shared this belief in the importance of the imagination. Blake talked of the need to 'cast aside from Poetry all that is not Inspiration'. Coleridge, in his great poems, lived up to his statement in Biographia Literaria — Wordsworth's 'characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity', but his (Coleridge's) endeavours were to be directed 'to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.' A few years later, Keats corroborated this sentiment by asserting, T am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination.' Mysticism and supernaturalism appealed to the Romantic writers and they emphasised passion and atmosphere over precision and argument. Tales of horror were written by Mary Shelley, Anne Radcliffe and Horace Walpole. Personal human experience came to be valued. In classical poetry, reason reigned supreme-dispelling mystery, satirising stupidity and indoctrinating social opinion. Romantic poetry stressed on grand gestures and rhetorical flourishes, and preached defiance rather than decorum. All good poetry, declared Wordsworth, 'is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'.

 

A love of the past, of Hellenism and of the medieval times, also characterised Romantic writing. Coleridge and Keats were attracted by the Middle Ages; Sir Walter Scott immortalised the history of Scotland; Lamb's personal essays were also vignettes of the happy days of the past. The Romantics were fascinated by the remote, the simple, the rustic and the democratic. Hence, to many of them, the Middle Ages offered a spiritual home—vague and mysterious.

 

The writers of the eighteenth century were ruled by the intellect, while the Romantics glorified emotions. They idealised the peasant and the child into the 'noble savage', and deified nature as a 'divine healeri. The glorification of the intuitive wisdom of childhood is juxtaposed with the exaltation of the primitive life of rustics, and both are important aspects of the Romantic escape from reality. This primitivist tendency was one of the powerful impulses bom out of the democratic forces triggered by the French Revolution.

 

The celebration of the self or the emphasis on individualism became one of the defining features of Romantic writing. Apart from tremendous external and political changes, the Romantic movement reflected a very fundamental internal and subtle revolution—a radical change in attitude towards the value of personal human experience. By discarding the rule of reason, these writers began to nurture a literature that highlighted subjectivity and the freedom of the individual. This was aided by the importance that the Romantic writers laid on the imagination. Despite the fact that the major writers came from different backgrounds and specialised in varied genres, their orientation was directed solely towards individual speculations—from impersonal objectivity to intense subjectivism.

 

The Romantic age in English literature is often identified with the resurgence of poetry, represented by towering figures like Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. Yet, the prose literature of the time is no less impressive. Scott's historical novels, Jane Austen's social novels and Mary Shelley's Gothic novels are significant contributions to the world of fiction. Lamb's personal essays, Leigh Hunt's fanciful writings, William Hazlitt's critical studies, and the brilliant prose by Thomas De Quincy and Walter Savage Landor have enriched the non-fictional prose literature of the age. This period also saw literary criticism firmly establish itself as a distinctive genre, through magazines like The Edinburgh Review, The Quarterly Review and The Westminster Review.

 

The Romantic spirit, thus, was redolent with an indefatigable energy and potency. Its manifestation was brought about by multiple causative factors. The obsession with the self, the new awareness of physical nature and a deep sense of alienation from society's preoccupation with material interests, characterised the movement. The Romantic impulse was further abetted by the emergence of a new reading public which made the writer free from his dependence on aristocratic patronage. The new-found freedom to express individual views, the break-down of the old agrarian economy and the advent of machines fuelled the need for the individual to assert his humanity. The overwhelming expansion of the creative urge impelled by these new trends, ushered in a literary impulse and opened the floodgates of creativity, leading to one of the most fecund periods of English literary history.

 

 

Romantic Poetry

 

Romantic poetry was an inevitable reaction to the social and critical poetry of the eighteenth century. Poets like Thomson, Crabbe, Gray, Collins, Cowper, Bums and specially Blake, had already charted a poetry that departed from the rigid classical conventions of eighteenth-century poetry. These poets had already voiced the 'Romantic' ideals—in their communion with nature, interest in simple human life, imaginative vision and lyrical subjectivity.

 

By the last two decades of the eighteenth century, Blake and Bums were already ensconced in the English poetic firmament as poets imbued with the spirit of Romanticism. However, it is the publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798—a joint venture by the young poets Wordsworth and Coleridge—that is usually accepted as the beginning of Romantic poetry. Their new poetry of reaction struck a defiant note against the social and satirical poetry of the school of Pope. They championed emotion over reason, instinct over experience, self over society. They strongly protested against the political, social, intellectual and artistic climate of the eighteenth century, and revelled in the newly-released spirit of idealism, romance and revolution, let loose by the French Revolution. The first-generation Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Landor also brought about a literary revolution which advocated freedom in language, technique and thought, and also indicated a shift in concerns and values.

 

The spirit of Romanticism in English poetry was characterised by several distinctive features —primarily, the freedom from restrictive classical conventions and the celebration of emotions and beauty. The Romantic poets found truth and beauty to be synonymous, and they also believed in the addition of strangeness and wonder to beauty. Their creed of beauty was not merely external but absolute. Keats's idealisation of the perennial inspiration of beauty—'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' — and Shelley's passion for loveliness mark their preoccupation with the imperishable appeal of true beauty in an otherwise perishable world.

 

Romantic poetry is never concerned with the human being as conditioned by society, but with the human being in his/ her essential simplicity and innocence, unaffected by social vices and follies. For instance, childhood is idealised by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth's greatest works concern classes of people generally ignored by earlier poets — children, the old and the poor, almost always in a rural context. He glorified downtrodden peasants like Simon Lee and the leech gatherer, and believed in the poet's duty to 'descend lower, among cottages and fields and among children'. The Romantic poets saw themselves as rebels against established modes of thought, both artistic and political.

 

Liberty and human rights were vociferously supported by Byron and Shelley, and both championed the cause of the oppressed humanity. Shelley became the most radical of all the Romantic poets and constantly fought for the cause of the free human spirit. He remained an 'anti¬ establishment' figure throughout his short life, and upheld the role of the poet as 'the unacknowledged legislator of mankind'.

 

Nature in all her splendour dominated and inspired the Romantic imagination and supplied the poets with creative vitality. They saw even the ordinary objects of nature —such as the blue sky, the rushing stream and the blooming flowers—with wonder. Nature became a living soul, an independent entity. To Wordsworth, nature was guide, healer and comforter; to Coleridge, nature assumed the person of a moral force; Shelley used nature to create myths; Keats escaped to the world of nature to forget his earthly woes. The Romantic poets thus added many new dimensions to English nature poetry and their fundamental creed was to establish the importance of the role of human beings in nature.

 

Romantic poetry was essentially imaginative. The poets' imaginative vigour expressed itself not merely in an imaginative presentation of the external world, but also in a mystic communion with all that could be seen and perceived. Hence, mysticism became an integral part of the Romantic imagination. Coleridge's poetry created a mystic and fanciful world, touching supernatural elements. Keats also was fascinated by the supernatural world, dreams and reverie. The conscious intellect was thus played down in relation to the spontaneous, the instinctual and the subconscious. Wordsworth spoke of 'the glory and the freshness of a dream' — poetic 'dream visions' became subjects of Romantic poetry, as in Wordsworth's The Prelude and Coleridge's Kubla Khan. Earlier notions regarding the poet were swept aside and madness, melancholy and poetic creativity went hand in hand. Coleridge's drug-induced visions became art and Keats sought escape through intoxication. So deeply embedded was the sense of anti-intellectualism, that one of Blake's emblems portrayed purblind Reason as clipping the wings of Love, and Keats later declared that 'philosophy will clip an angel's wings'.

 

Freed from eighteenth-century conventions, the role of the poet now underwent a change. New poetry became strongly subjective and 'self-revealing'. A favourite subject was the poet himself. Wordsworth reveals glimpses of his personal life in poems such as Tintern Abbey, The Prelude and the Yarrow poems; Byron's Don Juan and Keats's odes are all essentially personal poems.

 

Individualism became an essential feature of Romantic poetry also because of another deep-seated and complex reason. Industrial Revolution had led to the total anonymity of the individual, since small towns and villages began to disappear and were replaced by an impersonal mechanised society completely fostered by mass production. Individual identity had no place in such a world. The Romantic poets sought to remove this imbalance by giving greater importance to individual freedom. In all their writing, therefore, they celebrated the uniqueness of the individual spirit.

 

A recreation of the past—the remote and the exotic—was another characteristic of the poetry of the age. Along with the return to nature, the past, especially the Middle Ages, became a favourite hunting ground for the Romantic poets, but they were not so much concerned with historical accuracy. The Middle Ages attracted them more because of its remoteness, vagueness and sense of mystery. Foreign locales also appealed to them: Coleridge envisioned the enchanted palace of a Chinese emperor, the polar regions and the tropics; Keats evokes this spirit in the Eve of St Agnes and Lamia. These qualities in the Romantic poets reinforce the epithet 'Renaissance of Wonder' attributed to the age.

 

The Augustan poets of the eighteenth century favoured a formal style of writing exemplified by the balance and symmetry of the heroic couplet and they developed their own brand of poetic diction. The Romantic poets, on the other hand, moved away to forge a new and unique style of writing which captured the ebb and flow of individual experience, by adopting forms and language which were closer to common speech and hence more intelligible to the general reader. In the preface to the Lyrical Ballads (in the revised edition of 1802), Wordsworth's avowed intention was to ' . . . choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of the imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way.' The Romantic poets revived certain poetic forms used in earlier ages, such as the blank verse, the Spenserian stanza, the ballad, the irregular ode and the pastoral. They turned to medievalism and to the great Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights for inspiration regarding theme, technique and diction. The sonnet form, which lay in neglect since the Elizabethan times, was rejuvenated and restored to its former glory, at the hands of the Romantic poets.

 

In short, Romantic poetry heralded a coalescence of divergent views and ideologies. The poets of this age carried out a personal search for the spiritual, and many of their poems are built around this search. The poet ceased to be merely a man of letters, and became a creative artist enthused by the multifarious ideals of social justice, love of humanity, creative imagination and free expression. It is important to note, however, that these poets, during their lifetime, never came under the aegis of a single literary group. They never consciously followed a particular school of thought. Unlike the French and German Romantics, the English Romantic poets had a strong individualistic strain that discouraged any such concerted action. Hence none of the famous critical texts of the period—be they the 'Preface' to the Lyrical Ballads, Biographia Literaria or the Defence of Poetry — served as a manifesto of the Romantic movement. Their affiliation to the Romantic spirit comes forth in the intensity and the fervour they infused into their individual poems.

 

First-generation Romantic Poets

 

William Blake (1757-1827)

 

Blake—artist, poet and seer—stands as an isolated figure in the context of the Romantic movement, and yet, no discussion of English Romantic poetry can begin without him. Although bom in 1757, Blake decisively rejected everything that the eighteenth century upheld. He lived at a time when England was undergoing upheavals on all fronts—economic, political and cultural. But Blake insulated himself from the topical and the local, and lived in a world of his own creation.

 

As a boy, Blake was perceptive and imaginative, and he constantly saw visions by which he became drawn to theology. His father did not make him suffer the rigours of formal schooling, and he attended Henry Pars' drawing school, and in 1772, became an apprentice to James Basire, the engraver. After six years of rewarding work, he studied briefly at the Royal Academy of Arts. He got married in 1782 and made his living by engraving illustrations for various publishers. In 1800, he moved to Sussex to serve as a private artist and engraver for William Hayley, a gentleman poet and scholar. But after three years, when he felt that his creative genius was being reduced to mediocrity, he returned to London. He struggled to survive and the illuminated books that he wrote, painted, printed and bound himself, did not fare well. It was during these financially bleak years that he produced his two final masterpieces - Milton and Jerusalem. His reputation as a poet-engraver grew increasingly and his young disciples called themselves the 'Ancients'. Blake took on major new assignments, such as the illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy which was left incomplete when he died in 1827.

 

Blake's eclectic reading spanned the Bible, the works of Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, the religious writings of Boehme, Swedenborg, the Scandinavian religious philosopher and mystic, and Thomas Taylor, the translator of Plato and his neo- Platonist followers. As a result, he became firmly convinced of the importance of the spiritual world, and the presence of the 'divine' in man. 

 

Blake's friends included political radicals like William Godwin, Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. He ardently supported the American and the French revolutions, and fiercely opposed social abuses like slavery and child labour. Two antithetical traits in his nature —a visionary mysticism and a deep social commitment towards the oppressed and underprivileged—form repetitive leitmotifs in his poetry.

 

The various phases of Blake's life roughly coincide with the evolution of his artistic flowering. The first phase (1757-83) extends from his grooming as an engraver to the publication of Poetical Sketches in 1783. This was a time of his training in both the arts of poetry and design. As he had no formal education, he had little knowledge of grammar and composition and the Sketches remain a volume of imitative but visionary lyrics, a collection of 'Blakeian juvenalia'. Some of the poems are unworthy of his genius, but some are not only original in substance and daring in form, but also exquisite in quality. Poems like 'To the Evening Star' and 'To the Muses' are memorable.

 

The second phase of his poetic career (1783-1803) saw Blake living at Lambeth on the Sussex coast. During this period, he brought his two passions—poetry and engraving—triumphantly together with the publication of the Songs of Innocence in 1789. This volume was illustrated and illuminated in copper plates and printed by the poet himself. In compositional unity, the Songs of Innocence was a work of beauty and sheer genius. Blake recaptured an Elizabethan freshness, zest and careless ecstasy as no other lyrical poet had done before or since his time. He was strongly influenced by children's songs, ballads and hymns. Poems like 'Nurse's Song' and 'The Echoing Green' present the joys of childhood in a natural and protected world. In 'The Chimney Sweeper', Blake voices his outrage at the use of child labour for the back-breaking work of cleaning chimneys. No other poem, other than 'The Lamb', embodies Blake's belief that innocence is the first stage in the journey to truth. The poem is a dialogue between the child and the lamb, a mixture of the Christian spirit and the pastoral tradition. The child asks questions, and since he is full of faith, finds simple answers. The poem presents the ideals of charity and Christian compassion in serene domestic rural locations. The lamb—soft, white and pure—stands simultaneously for the child himself as well as for Christ, the Redeemer of mankind. In the Bible, Christ is often called the Lamb of God.

 

Blake's preoccupation with the themes of innocence and experience was to reappear in Songs of Experience which he added to the Songs of Innocence in 1794. The Book of Thel (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93), The French Revolution (1791), Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), America (1793), Europe (1794), Urizen (1794), The Song of Los (1795) and The Four Zoas (1797) —all belong to the group of early prophetic works. They supplement the concept that, to Blake, poetry was translated vision and the poet was a prophet. This body of work makes difficult reading because of the heavy personal symbolism involved. Poems such as The French Revolution and America show Blake's reaction to the two revolutions which he interpreted as releasing the energies of humanity long repressed by the forces of absolutism, institutionalised religion and sexual inhibition. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell voices his contempt for eighteenth-century rationalism and Blake's belief that God was both good and evil. His later prophecies became increasingly obscure and intricate.

 

In Songs of Innocence, Blake, like Vaughan and Traherne, had highlighted the unadulterated happiness of a child's world. His Songs of Experience portrays the inevitability that a child must leave his innocence and struggle in a world where evil is an integral component. This is the core of Blake's philosophy—the merging of the opposites, the fusion of innocence and experience, good and evil, flesh and spirit, heaven and hell. He firmly believed that 'without contraries, is no progression', and therefore, he published the two volumes as one, where the title was followed by the words 'showing two contrary states of the human soul'. The poems in Songs of Experience embody Blake's intense dislike for authority at all levels—parental, educational and religious. His distaste for institutionalised discipline is revealed in a poem like 'Holy Thursday'. In 'The Sick Rose', he describes the corruption of beauty and innocence. 'London' is a criticism of social systems. 'The Tiger' is an inscrutable fusion of latent cruelty and power.

 

'The Tiger', Blake's best-known poem, has been given multiple interpretations by successive generations, but the enduring symbol is of the tiger as the natural and creative energy of human life which is beyond control. In Songs of Experience, the child and the young adult are impeded by social and religious oppression. Blake's illustrations show death, sorrow, menace and desolation and the poems resonate with the angry voice of protest. The innocent lamb is replaced by the experienced tiger. In 'The Lamb', the world is in harmony with its 'Maker', but in 'The Tiger', there is no reassuring answer. According to Blake, innocence is intrinsically associated with the child's vision of life—before he gains the knowledge of evil—which is an imaginative state of goodness. The state of experience, the consciousness of evil forces, enters with adolescence when one gains the knowledge of the world with its exploitative and repressive systems and institutions, and life's challenges corrupt and destroy the state of innocence.

 

The last phase of Blake's poetic career (1803-27), spent in London, saw Blake no longer as the prolific poet of the second phase, but moving towards an increasing extravagance in his style, and also realising his full potential as an artist. Milton (1808) and Jerusalem (1820) were the two prophetic works of this period, often impenetrable in their obscurity. Both the works are replete with Christian symbolism, and in Milton, Blake elaborates his illuminating statement that Milton was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it'. Jerusalem, his longest poem, is also the most richly decorated of his illuminated books. The most notable poetry Blake wrote after Jerusalem is to be found in The Everlasting Gospel (c.1818), a fragmentary work containing a challenging reinterpretation of the character and teaching of Christ. His last years were devoted mainly to pictorial art. Blake printed his own works and painstakingly coloured them by hand. Visually, his books resembled medieval manuscripts, combining a rich feast of text and illustration. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he described his method of printing as 'melting apparent surfaces away and displaying the infinite which was hid'.

 

Blake's poetry was a marked departure from the conventional neoclassical poetry in every sphere—conceptually as well as stylistically. The formal pedantry of the earlier school was replaced by a verse that had a carefree spirit and a delightful ease of experience. The didactic couplet gave way to free lines and open stanzas. In Songs of Innocence, the rhymes and words are childlike yet deeply meaningful; in Songs of Experience, his words evoke a sense of terror as well as solemn beauty. His diction was perfect in its simplicity, aptness and beauty; and his capacity to sing was infinite.

 

Even when Blake's poems are obscure, they are still a moving and beautiful experience. He created his own world of mythology and complex symbolism. His villains are all associated with law and repression, and include Jehovah, Moses, Newton, Locke, priests, law-givers and, specially, fathers. Blake always rebelled against strictures, and the Ten Commandments were an anathema to him. His heroes are associated with the forces of joy and love and include Isaiah, Ezekiel, Christ and Satan, and also Renaissance artists like Raphael and Michelangelo. For all his eccentricity and obscurity, Blake remains one of the great lyrical voices of English poetry. The presence of a childlike simplicity and the profundity of his prophecy create a unique combination in his works.

 

Blake's vision of the contradictory forces beneath the appearances of human civilisation mirrored the intense political turmoil in Europe and the New World during his lifetime. He rekindled interest in the medieval and the Gothic, he moulded the past to suit his own terms and he found a new language to express his startling ideas. Few other poets speak in quite the same way and no other music sounds quite the same.

 

Robert Bums (1759-96)

 

Bom to an impoverished Scottish farmer, Burns's childhood and youth were spent in extreme hardship on his Ayrshire farm. Educated by his father, Bums started work as a farm labourer. Three influences shaped his life decisively—his love for literature, his interest in nature, and his intense patriotism. Scottish legends and ballads inspired him to write poetry. At twenty- two, Bums left the farm and became a flax¬ dresser in a nearby town, but in 1784, after his father's death, he returned to farming. In 1786, his first volume of poetry — Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect -was published in Kilmarnock. This volume brought him fame and in the next year, the larger Edinburgh edition appeared. Bums was lionised as an untutored rustic genius, but poetic fame did not alleviate his hardships. He continued to write songs, contributing to James Johnson's The Scots Musical Museum (1787-1803). This volume contains Bums's immortal songs like 'Auld Lang Syne' and 'My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose'. The love lyric, left unexplored in English poetry since the middle of the seventeenth century, reached new heights of both simplicity and accuracy of imagery in Burns. 'My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose' set a new benchmark in the annals of English love poetry. In 1788, he bought a small farm in Ellisland where he lived with his wife and a growing family. In 1791, he became an excise man to supplement his income. However, poverty forced him to abandon the farm and move to Dumfries, where he wrote little of importance except for Tam O' Shanter, Captain Mathew Henderson and the hundred-odd lyrics which he contributed to George Thomson's A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (1793-1811). He died at the age of thirty-seven, his health undermined by rheumatism and his personal problems.

 

Although his origins were from a genuinely peasant stock and he attained a cult status as a ploughman-poet, Bums was proud of his rustic roots and he cultivated his mind by reading the great English and French poets. He was extremely versatile in the Scots vernacular and many of his most celebrated lyrics were drawn from the strong native material of Scottish folklore and daily life. He was earthy and possessed the supreme gift of music — the capacity to unite tender personal emotions with tuneful words. He was best at depicting the lives of peasants, in dealing with rustic beliefs, superstitions, customs and occasions. To readers with a refined urbane taste, poems like 'Highland Mary' and 'The Jolly Beggars', with their quaint and detailed descriptions of the unsophisticated aspects of Scottish life and their broad uproarious comedy, may not be very palatable, but it is Bums at his scintillating best. His themes were always about Scotland's poor, which did not afford scope for the nobler possibilities of poetry. In this respect, Arnold was justified when he denied the highest echelons of poetry to Bums. But Bums's mastery of the serio-comic and the macabre in verse was unquestioned. He handled all the old stanza forms with confidence. In his hands, the song transcended all barriers of language and oddities of dialect. His poems reveal a blend of humour and sadness that have made him accepted as the Scottish national poet. In his lyrics, the Romantic spirit became earthy, literally, and it was tinged with tenderness and a hint of satire in his awareness of the exploitations of class divisions which prevailed in the countryside.

 

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

 

Acclaimed to be perhaps Britain's third greatest poet (after Shakespeare and Milton), William Wordsworth was bom, nourished and educated in the Lake District of England, where he composed his greatest poetry. In 1787, he joined St John's College, Cambridge, where he was unsettled by the unfamiliar climate of worldliness, but it was this academic stint that made him gradually shed his awe of 'printed books and authorship'. He spent the summer and autumn of 1790 on a walking tour of France, Germany and Switzerland, which is commemorated in Descriptive Sketches composed in 1792. He went back to France at the end of 1791 and this visit to revolutionary France was one of the most significant experiences of his life. He saw the ruins of the Bastille and his impressionable mind was enthused by the fire of the revolutionary spirit. He returned to England in December 1792 and made his debut as a budding poet.

 

For Wordsworth, the period 1793-95 was one of great personal unhappiness, uncertainty about his professional future and disillusionment with the French Revolution drifting into the political terror of the Jacobin dictatorship. When England declared war against France in February 1793, the remnants of Wordsworth's faith in the Revolution died. Briefly, he came under the spell of Godwin's radical political ideas, but was soon repelled by his extreme rationalism. By 1794-95, his financial condition stabilised because of a legacy left to him by a friend. He was now in a position to follow his vocation as a poet and to set up house with his favourite sister Dorothy. At first they settled in Dorset where Wordsworth wrote the first version of 'The Ruined Cottage' and his only play, the blank-verse tragedy, The Borderers. The brother-sister duo then shifted to Alfoxden in Somerset, in order to be near their exciting new friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was living at Netherstowey.

 

Encouraged, and in many ways, inspired by Dorothy, both Wordsworth and Coleridge entered a period of intense creativity which produced the Lyrical Ballads, which the otherwise restrained Encyclopaedia Britannica unreservedly called 'the most important event in the history of English poetry after Milton'. Both poets were pledged to the Romantic canon, but their approaches were essentially different. It was agreed that Coleridge was to make incredible romances seem real, while Wordsworth was to reveal the romance of the commonplace. Wordsworth's objective was to endow 'the charm of novelty to things of everyday ... by awakening the mind's attention and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.' Thus, the Lyrical Ballads mingled the natural and the supernatural, and revealed them as contrasting marvels of observation and imagination. The two signature poems — The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge and Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintem Abbey by Wordsworth— came to be accepted as the chief glories of English poetry. Three editions of the Lyrical Ballads were printed before 1805; the second was enriched by a preface which served as the manifesto of the Romantic movement. It was claimed that the ballads were an experiment to ascertain 'how far the language of conversation is adapted for the purpose of poetic pleasure'; and though many of Wordsworth's poems in the volume were dull and uninspiring, there was no doubt that a new diction had been created. This everyday language gave character and structure to Wordsworth's lyrics and his kinship with nature gave his domesticated blank verse a quality that was unique when compared to the sonorous blank verse of Milton and the pedestrian blank verse of Cowper.

 

The Wordsworths and Coleridge went on a trip to Germany in the autumn of 1798. While Dorothy and her brother resided in the remote little town of Goslar, Coleridge proceeded to the University of Gottingen. It was in Goslar that Wordsworth wrote his enigmatic 'Lucy poems', about an English girl known and lost in boyhood. The sequence is mournful in tone, but it changes at the end to an uplifted resignation as the poet reaffirms the unity of all life, and even death, with nature. On their return to England in 1799, the Wordsworths moved into Dove Cottage, Grasmere. This phase became the most productive in the poet's life. The Excursion, the 'Preface' to the Lyrical Ballads, Resolution and Independence and parts of his ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, were composed during this period. Both these poems appeared in Poems in two volumes, 1807, along with the Ode to Duty and Miscellaneous Sonnets. Bonnets such as 'The World is Too Much with Us', 'Composed Upon Westminster Bridge' and To Milton' reveal the essence of Wordsworth as a poet who enriched and enlarged the significance of ordinary experience. They are the true autobiography of the human spirit as well as the reflection of the times.

Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, Dorothy's childhood friend, in 1802. His life and creative energies were now channelised efficiently and he worked on his poetic autobiography, The Prelude, which he had begun in Germany in 1798. He was now at the height of his creative powers and the fourteen-book version of the poem was intermittently written, the final edition appearing posthumously in 1850. The Prelude, Or Growth of a Poet's Mind was a poetic reflection that treated as its central subject the narrator's development as a poet, the forces that shaped his imaginative powers and his spiritual crisis and recovery. The confessional form placed the narrator in the position of the principal subject of the narrative. Together with the autobiographical details, the work was a comprehensive critique of the negativity of modem civilisation. In spite of all its disturbing undertones caused by the poet's reactions to the turbulent political scenario of his times, The Prelude began and finally returned in spirit to the timeless beauty and simplicity that Wordsworth had found in his Cumberland childhood and youth.

 

The following years brought in mixed fortunes for Wordsworth. Personal losses and the estrangement from Coleridge affected the poet. In 1813, he moved to Rydal Mount, where he remained for the rest of his life. The Excursion was published in 1814, The White Doe of Rylstone in 1815 and Poems, Including Lyrical Ballads in 1815 —the first of many collected editions of old and new poetical works which he frequently revised and reclassified over the next thirty-five years. Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse (composed 1798) and The Waggoner (composed 1805) were both published in 1819. After his forties, Wordsworth's poetic powers declined. His earlier affiliation to freedom underwent a change, and he became increasingly conservative, placing security above liberty. With the loss of his earlier convictions, his verse lost its strength as his mind lost its flexibility. In 1843, he succeeded Southey as Poet Laureate, which the younger Romantics saw as a breach of faith. The work of his later years, hence, was the inspiration of a less demanding muse and his poetic output reflected it. Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems was published in 1835, and even when the ageing poet recaptured emotional heights, it was the emotion of a pragmatic recluse; the magic was gone. Wordsworth died on 23 April 1850.

 

Wordsworth wrote poetry all his life, but the visionary intensity of his youth faded away in the later years. One of the most striking features of Wordsworth's poetry is its total absorption with the self. Everything that the poet is concerned with—people, nature, landscape, and occasions—is important only in terms of their impact upon himself. The Romantic assertion of the self found one of its best exponents in Wordsworth. Even when he describes the grandeur of nature, the focal point remains on the emotional state and responses of the poet himself. Thus the T is the pivot—the all consuming interest of the poet, by which everything else is eclipsed.

 

Like Blake, Wordsworth also regarded the child as the single most important source of wisdom and truth. In his ode, Intimations of Immortality, he develops the idea that at birth, one comes 'trailing clouds of glory . . . From God, who is our home'. The child is seen here as 'the father to the man'. He firmly believed that it is only by recapturing the bloom of childhood that creativity can be revived.

Wordsworth was always drawn to the poor, the downtrodden and the 'sons of the soil'. In Michael, the sturdy shepherd is bound to his land and to the community by ties of simple piety and dignity. He championed the essential man uncorrupted by the ways of the world —such as the leech-gatherer, Simon Lee, the idiot-boy, the solitary reaper and others. He never eulogised the higher rungs of society; on the other hand, he upheld the intrinsic merit of the dalesmen, the shepherds and the beggars of the English countryside. 

 

He celebrated the qualities of strength, optimism, endurance, courage and tenacity which he found in ordinary humanity.

 

Most often, Wordsworth is cursorily labelled as England's leading 'nature poet'. It is true that his bones were bred in the midst of nature in England, and each great poem, like Tintem Abbey, the Lucy poems and The Prelude, is a testament to this claim. All his life, he walked the valleys and fields of the Lake District ceaselessly, lived most of his life there and wrote great poetry in and about the area. His informal learning came from an intense interaction with nature as a young roving boy. This imbued in him the foundations of 'high thinking' and natural living, thus heightening his strength and sensitivity. When he returned, at the end of 1799, to the Lake District with his sister, to make it his home for the last fifty years of his life, the imprint of his childhood experiences in the midst of nature finally became crystallised into the poetry of the best creative phase of his life.

 

Wordsworth association with nature proved to be an umbilical cord that was never severed—it nourished and sustained him throughout his life. Nature, to Wordsworth, had a multiple persona— at times it was paradise; at times a lost Eden, as is evident in the narrative poem Michael; at times a spiritual force, as in the Immortality Ode, and at times, a source of infectious and undiluted joy, as in 'The Daffodils'; at times the embodiment of tragic loss, as in Michael and the 'Lucy poems'. He also found in nature the ideal teacher and guide, to direct man to self- knowledge and truth, and also to provide solace by being a comforter and healer. His implicit faith in the goodness and wisdom of nature is echoed in these lines from 'The Tables Turned':

 

One impulse from the vernal wood

May teach you more of man, 

Of moral evil and of good 

Than all the sages can.

 

Wordsworth's vision of nature centres around another important preoccupation of his poetic credo—the impact and influence of nature on the human mind. In all his poems, Wordsworth glorifies the spirit of man living in harmony with his natural environment, untouched by the ways of the corrupt world. It was not entirely his revolutionary zeal for the common man that made him immortalise the humble country people. Rather, it was largely because he knew such characters that he chooses them, because he saw them in their own landscapes, in the context of nature, and because nature and such human beings interpenetrated one another. In this sense, Wordsworth was not so much the poet of nature, as of man in nature. He valued in humanity what is permanent in it and this perspective did not change from his revolutionary youth to his high-lory old age. He deliberately shunned the materialistic society of his day. It is interesting to note that most of his great characters are in fact all solitaries, usually old men or children, and on their independence and high moral standing, his noble and happy view of humanity is based. In his poetry, there are not too many descriptions of particular scenes, for it is the emotional meaning which nature can have—and not its visual impact—which occupied Wordsworth.

 

Imagination was a tool handled by each Romantic poet in his own unique way. Although Wordsworth confined himself 'to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday', his powers of imagination elevated the 'everyday' into the extraordinary and even the exotic. The aura or the supernatural that shrouds the poetry of Coleridge is missing in Wordsworth, but his best poetry is coloured by the vitality of his imaginative powers, by which common things of life and nature are made to appear to be uncommon. Wordsworth's imagery can sometimes be uninspiring, but in poems like The Prelude and Tintern Abbey, the commonplace every day experiences are transmuted and transfigured by his integrated imaginative vision of nature. Even behind his famous assertion that poetry takes its origin from 'emotions recollected in tranquility', Wordsworth acknowledges the importance of the imagination in the creative process because without this requisite, the contemplation and recollection of emotion will not be possible. Wordsworth was thus a great original who broke with convention and the icy grip of reason and poured imagination back into poetry.

 

Stylistically, Wordsworth wanted to avoid what he took to be the 'gaudiness and inane phraseology' of many of his predecessors and contemporaries. His aim, as he put it in the 1805 edition of Lyrical Ballads, was 'to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men'. He discarded the outworn heroic couplet and revived some of the forgotten old forms of poetry like the ballad, the lyric, the sonnet and the ode, and infused beauty and life into them. In the sonnet, he achieved a mastery of form with simple dignity and disciplined language. Songs such as 'The Solitary Reaper' are faultless in diction, which blends perfectly with the scene and mood. He achieved an unsurpassed verbal felicity in blank- verse narrative poems such as Michael and The Leech Gatherer. His narrative skills were not always uniform, and they sometimes stumbled into the prosaic, but his experiments changed the course of English poetry. Wordsworth became an inventor of a new poetic language, and above all, he was one of those rarest poets exuding joy, not because he was simplistic but because through his unifying vision, imagination and faith, he reached that central peace, subsisting at the heart / of endless agitation.' 

 

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

 

Scott's popularity as a novelist has always overshadowed his ability as a poet, but he entered literature through poetry. Bom in a family of twelve children, Scott was crippled by infantile paralysis, a handicap which he overcame and did not allow to inhibit his activities. Educated at Edinburgh High School and at Edinburgh University, he majored in law and joined the bar in 1792. He read voraciously and devoured folklores and ballads. He began his literary career by anonymously publishing in 1796 an adaptation of Ballads by G. A. Burger, which he followed up in 1801 with contributions to M. G. Lewis's Tales of Wonder. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, an edition of old and new Scottish Ballads, was stimulated by a study of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The first installment of this compilation was published in 1801. A metrical version of the romance Sir Tristram appeared in 1804. This phase of Scott's poetic career was dominated by a passion for Gothic-Germanic sorcery and antiquarian enthusiasm. In 1805, with the publication of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, based on an old border narrative, Scott's reputation as a poet was firmly established. This was followed by Mannion (1808), The Lady of the Lake (1810), The Vision of Don Roderick (1811), Rokeby and The Bridal of Triermain (both in 1813), The Lord of the Isles and The Field of Waterloo (both in 1815) and Harold the Dauntless (1817). Readers immediately responded to Scott's patriotism, his sense of abounding life and his glorification of the heroic. He wrote several shorter poems later in his life, but ironically, some of his most memorable verses were found in his novels.

As a Romantic poet, Scott was imbued with the spirit of the age. But while Wordsworth focused on the wonder of daily life, Scott devoted himself to resurrecting the past. Today, he is hardly read as a poet, but there is no question about the vitality of his characters and situations. He remains the poet 'of the peasant, soldier, outlaw and artisan'.

 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

 

Poet, critic and philosopher, Coleridge was the youngest son of the vicar of Ottery St Mary, a county town in Devon, where he spent his childhood. After his father's death, he attended the charity school Christ's Hospital from 1782 to 1791, and then went to study in Jesus College, Cambridge. The vacillations in his character began by the time he was nineteen. He first planned to be a surgeon and a few months later, he discovered Voltaire, and decided to become a philosopher. The stint at Cambridge did not last long and he left without a degree in 1794. Coleridge even enlisted in a military regiment for a short while under a false name, Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke. But a few weeks of discipline weaned him from military life. Meanwhile, he met the poet Robert Southey who was inspired by the French Revolution, and both of them dreamt of a government of all, by all, a scheme to which they gave the name 'Pantisocracy'. They envisaged the founding of an ideal community on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, in America. The marriage of Coleridge and Southey to the Fricker sisters—Sarah and Edith—in 1795, was not unconnected with the practical side of enlarging this utopian colony. Coleridge eventually blamed Southey for the failure of this scheme.

Trapped in an unfortunate marriage, Coleridge published a number of poems which appeared in a volume in 1796, and in the same year, he shifted to Bristol to edit a weekly paper, The Watchman, which failed after two months. About this time, Coleridge started taking the drug laudanum.

 

In the summer of 1795, Coleridge had already met Wordsworth, and the two had become fast friends. An admirer made it possible for Coleridge to write in comparative comfort in a cottage in Somersetshire, and Wordsworth joined him there. Harsh personal experiences brought the poets closer to each other, with Dorothy surrounding them with motherly protectiveness. The Lyrical Ballads (1798) was the fruit of their numerous discussions on life and literature. Coleridge's contributions to the first edition of the work were The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Nightingale and two scenes from his tragedy, Osorio, which was successfully staged in 1812, under the title Remorse. In the landmark 1800 edition, three more poems were added —The Foster Mother's Tale, The Dungeon and Love. Together, the two poets entered upon one of the most influential creative periods of English literature. Coleridge worked on a new informal mode of poetry in which he used a conversational tone and rhythm to unify a work. This experimentation is evident in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and 'Frost at Midnight'.

 

ln the scheme of the Lyrical Ballads, the roles of the two poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, were very clearly demarcated, from the beginning. Wordsworth was to make the ordinary extraordinary, and Coleridge, the extraordinary ordinary!$The Ancient Mariner is a cumulatively exciting poem in the style of an ancient ballad, where Coleridge celebrates the Life or Spirit which animates both man and the natural world. The germ of the poem was bom during a walk with Wordsworth on the Quantock Hills, on 20 November 1797. The idea of the story was provided by a dream experienced by Wordsworth's neighbour John Cruickshank, about 'a person suffering from a dire curse for the commission of some crime,' and a 'skeleton ship with figures in it.' Wordsworth added to it the idea of a man who killed an albatross and was plagued by avenging spirits. Coleridge combined all these ideas to create his spell-binding masterpiece. The poem is an intricate amalgam of creative vision and meditation, and of accurate research and unfettered romanticism. The frequent use of archaic words and plain rhythms recreates the atmosphere of the old ballads, and the bizarre story and the remoteness of the imagery create a never-to-be-forgotten experience. Hazlitt encapsulated these sentiments when he commented that the poem was magical and the result 'of wild, irregular, overwhelming imagination'.

 

The year 1797-98 was creatively productive for Coleridge—he wrote 'Kubla Khan', 'This Lime-tree Bower My Prison' and the first part of Christabel, his unfinished Gothic ballad, where Coleridge aimed to show how primal energy might be redeemed through contact with the spirit of innocent love. 'Kubla Khan or A Vision in a Dream' is a 54-line poetic fragment, which was written after the poet woke up from a laudanum-induced sleep, where he saw the vision of a magnificent palace built by the mighty Chinese emperor Kubla Khan. Because of the exotic imagery and rhythmic cadence of the poem, early critics decreed that it should be read simply as a reverie and enjoyed for its vivid and sensual qualities. After studying Coleridge's mythological and psychological interests, later critics held that the work had a complex structure of meaning and was basically a poem about the nature of creative genius.

 

In 1798-99, Coleridge travelled to Germany with the Wordsworths, and he spent nine months imbibing German culture, especially the transcendental philosophy of Kant and Schelling. This was to have a profound impact on his thought. In the same year, he wrote France, An Ode, and rejected the revolutionary principles which he had found so inspiring at first. During the years 1800-04 he lived near Wordsworth in Keswick in the Lake District. He fell in love with Wordsworth's sister- in-law Sarah Hutchinson, a relationship referred to in Dejection: An Ode (1802). The period following 1802 was the darkest in Coleridge's life, and the writings of this period that survive are redolent with this unhappiness. As tensions in his personal life increased, Coleridge's addiction to opium also escalated. He began to revive during the winter of 1811-12 and started to give public lectures on poetry, in which his incomparable insight as a literary critic was at once clear to his contemporaries. He found consolation in his return to the Anglican Church and the stability of this affiliation enabled him to produce large works again.

 

In 1817, Biographia Literaria, Coleridge's autobiographical apologia and a landmark in literary theory and criticism, was published. A new dramatic piece, Zapolya, come out the same year. Coleridge was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1824. All this while, he had begun to live in the homes of various benefactors, sinking progressively under the spell of opium. The last years of his life were spent in Highgate, at the home of Dr James Gilman.

Biographia Literaria appeared in two volumes in 1817. The first volume recounts the writers' association with Southey and Wordsworth. Coleridge then describes the various influences on his philosophical development, from his early teachers to the German philosophers. This volume also includes his well-known discussion of the difference between fancy and imagination. In the second volume, Coleridge concentrates on literary criticism and proposes theories about the creative process and the historical sources of the elements of poetry. The work remains the most important record of literary criticism of the English Romantic period.

 

Aids to Reflection came out in 1825 and proved to be the most popular of Coleridge's prose works. Church and State was the last work published in his lifetime. The posthumous publication in 1835 of Table Talk included hundreds of Coleridge's letters and added vastly to his interesting personality and thought. This insight into Coleridge's fragmented life was strengthened by Kathleen Cobum's edition of his notebooks.

 

Coleridge's poetic output is small and diverse, and of great importance. His conversation poems such as 'Frost at Midnight' and 'This Lime-tree Bower My Prison' are reflective in the tradition of Gray and Cowper, while his major symbolic works such as The Ancient Mariner and 'Kubla Khan' plumb new psychological and emotional depths. Coleridge's poetic development was dominated by his fear that the 'shaping spirit of Imagination' will be lost to him. His two greatest poems, however, succeed stupendously in the imaginative task of recreation and idealisation, and embody universal human emotions in the most concrete and simple of images. These poems optimise the Romantic spirit in their exotic locales and the primal immediacy of their symbols. In his best poems, Coleridge wrote a romance which was subtler, stranger and more spiritual than any created by his contemporaries. His mysticism was intensified by his reading of the German philosophers. As a poet, his perspectives were consistently more intellectually alert than those of Wordsworth. If Wordsworth represented that aspect of the Romantic revival which was best described as 'the return to nature', Coleridge did justice to the phrase 'Renaissance of wonder' by reviving the supernatural as a literary force and endowing it with mystery and indefiniteness which added to it the highest potency to work on the human mind. Coleridge was always erratic as a poet, and was at times capable of extreme dreariness and flatness. After poems like 'Youth and Age' (1825) and 'Work without Hope' (1826), he felt that his muse had left him. His limitations were to a large extent the faults of his personality and his habits, and they hampered his poetic growth.

 

The number of his great poems may be limited, but they are unique and Coleridge remains a poet whom J. S. Mill, the British philosopher, called 'one of the seminal minds of his age'.

 

Besides being a poet, Coleridge was a philosopher, theologian, literary critic, journalist and playwright. As a critic, he combined originality and erudition and was remarkable for his profound and original insights, and his ability to see both the workings of the poet's mind and the first principles underlying a poem. As a journalist, he was concerned with social and political questions all his life and he moved from a radical to a more conservative standpoint, like many others of his time. As a thinker, he was at times confused and lacked both direction and integration. His aim was to achieve a true harmony between the various products of his prodigious mind. Hence he remained more of an interesting thinker than a philosopher. His great contribution was the introduction of the works of the German idealist philosophers to Britain.

 

Gifted with a brilliant mind and a silver tongue, Coleridge's towering genius began to wane early in life, undermined by opium and unhappiness. His legacy is small but those few magical and mystical poems are enough to place him among the greatest writers of English literature.

 

Robert Southey (1774-1843)

 

Southey was educated at Westminster School in London, from which he was expelled for criticising the practice of excessive whipping, in an article that appeared in the school magazine. This showed the rebellious side of his nature and confirmed his enthusiasm for the ideals of the French Revolution. When he joined Balliol College, Oxford, in 1792, Southey expressed his ardent sympathy for the Revolution in the long poem Joan of Arc (written 1792, published 1796). In 1794, he met Coleridge with whom he collaborated on the play, The Fall of Robespierre, and planned to set up a Pantisocratic community in the United States. This enthusiasm soon waned, causing a rift with Coleridge. He travelled to Portugal at the end of 1795 and the poetry of this period included many of the lyrics and ballads for which he is known. Poems such as 'The Scholar', 'The Inchcape Rock', 'The Battle of Blenheim' and 'The Holly Tree' belong to this period.

 

On his return to England, Southey settled at Greta Hall in Keswick, and was therefore often misleadingly classed with Wordsworth and Coleridge as one of the Lake Poets. An oriental verse epic, Thalaba the Destroyer, appeared in 1801, followed by another exotic narrative, Madoc, in 1805. He wrote prolifically during the next few years, not merely poetry, but also history, biography and translations. The Curse of Kehama, another long poem, appeared in 1810. In 1813, Southey became the Poet Laureate, and was branded as a radical who had prostituted himself to the establishment. The poems of his Laureateship include The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo (1816), Princess Charlotte's Epithalamium and Her Elegy (1817) and ten odes on various public events.

 

Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864)

 

Landor was educated at Rugby School and Trinity College, Oxford. He published his first collection of poems in 1795. This was followed by Gebir (1798), an exotic poem in seven books, and Count Julian (1811), a tragedy. Landor left England in 1814 and made Italy his home till 1835. He returned to England, only to leave again for the continent in 1858. Landor's life was a succession of petty quarrels, public rages, libels and lawsuits.

 

Nothing could be more dissimilar than Landor's turbulent lifestyle and the aesthetics of his craft. His lyrics are remarkable for their poise and purity. In the twentieth century, George Moore and W. B. Yeats hailed Landor as the embodiment of aesthetic perfection. His verse is low-pitched and controlled, never ecstatic. This serenity is more evident in the quatrains written in his old age, such as On His Seventy Fifth Birthday. In these poems, Landor effectively combined style and substance.

 

The Second-generation Romantic Poets

 

The publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is generally taken to be the beginning of the English Romantic movement, and the French Revolution as its immediate catalyst. Hence, Blake, Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge are referred to as the first- generation Romantic poets. As the promise of the French Revolution belied peoples' expectations and reaction fomented in Britain, the idealistic first-generation poets became increasingly conservative and orthodox. Coleridge returned to the fold of the Anglican Church and Wordsworth became stolidly conventional. Southey, once the co-originator with Coleridge of Pantisocracy, turned away from 'strong emotion' and in 1813, accepted the Poet Laureateship, thus declaring his affiliation with the establishment. The second- generation Romantic poets like Byron and Shelley, however, remained loyal to the progressive ideals of the French Revolution and they were vocal about their older contemporaries betraying the faith invested in them. These poets continued their crusade against exploitation and oppression in their own ways. Keats also belonged to this group, but his focus as a poet was elsewhere. Taken together, these first and second generation versifiers constitute the great Romantic pantheon of poets.

 

Gordon Lord Byron (1788-1824) v Byron was the son of a Scottish heiress, descended from James I of Scotland, and a profligate father, 'Mad Jack Byron'. Byron's upbringing was hardly calculated to foster stability of character. His father died when he was three, and his mother alternately petted and abused him. Byron was bom in London and educated at home and later at Aberdeen Grammar School. In 1798, he inherited the title of Baron from his great uncle. He went to Harrow in 1801 and his first poems were written there. In 1805, Byron proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he cultivated a reputation for high-spirited and extravagant behaviour. Bom with the physical disability of lameness and the victim of infantile paralysis, his profligacy was, in a way, an over-compensation for his feeling of physical inadequacy.

 

In January 1807, Byron published a small volume of verse, Hours of Idleness, and reviewers, especially the critic at the Edinburgh Review, were most unkind to him. Byron's retaliation was his poem 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers' in 1809 —an energetic, if crude, satire on his contemporaries. From 1809 to 1811, he travelled in Spain, Portugal, Greece and the Middle East. These years were of the greatest significance to him, for his travels provided him with the material for the poems which made him popular. Upon his return in 1811, Byron took his seat in the House of Lords and published the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a subjective verse travelogue revealing the melancholy poet as a distracted pleasure¬ seeker. The poem was a huge success and Harold became the first of the typically 'Byronic' heroes. Byron himself became the darling of London society—the society, aroused from its boredom, lionised him not only as a 'poet of passion' but also as a brilliant politician. Byron basked in the adulation. Constantly pursued by women, he ended up marrying, in 1815, Anne Isabella Milbanke, a mathematician and heiress. But he continued to be sullied as a 'womaniser', his name being associated with Lady Caroline Lamb, Lady Oxford and Lady Frances Webster. At this point, he met his half-sister Augusta, who was married to Colonel Leigh. A mutual attraction sparked immediately and this strained his marriage. After the birth of a daughter, his wife returned to her family, charging Byron with incest. The London society dropped him immediately. Bitterly aggrieved and railing against social hypocrisies, Byron left England, never to return.

 

Between 1813 and 1816, Byron wrote a series of romantic verse-tales, of which the main constituents were an exotic setting, a love plot and a dark, brooding, passionate hero. These poetical tales—such as The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Giaour 1813), The Corsair (1814), Lara (1814), Jacqueline (1814), The Siege of Corinth (1816) and Parisinal (1816)—were popular to a degree that is hard to imagine today. His fame and notoriety grew; each new publication was quickly sold out and was heatedly discussed. Not only literature, but fashion and art of the time were influenced by Byron's unconventional style.

 

In the spring of 1816, Byron joined Shelley, Mary Godwin and her stepsister Claire Claremont, who soon became his mistress and bore him a daughter, Allegra, who died in infancy. But fidelity was never his forte, and his stay in the Italian cities like Venice, Ravenna, Pisa and Genoa, was interspersed with various mistresses. Peter Quenrell, in Byron in Italy, wrote, 'unnamed and unnumbered, his concubines came and went.'

 

Meanwhile, Byron's creative faculty was more productive than ever. Canto III of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage came out in 1816, followed by The Prisoner of Chilion (1816), the fourth canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818), Beppo (1818) Mezeppa (1819) and the first canto of Don Juan, all belong to this period. In September 1817, the turning point in his poetic career came about, when he read a poem written in 'ottava rima'. Byron immediately adopted this eight-line stanzaic pattern, each line with ten syllables, in English. His first work in this form was Beppo, a Venetian story, and he had discovered the perfect vehicle for his genius. In 1818, he started Don Juan, a rambling picaresque satire. The first two cantos were published in 1819 and all sixteen cantos were finished by 1824. Here, Byron's central character was not the aggressive libertine of popular tradition, but a passive, if unprincipled, innocent who gains knowledge and sexual expertise through a variety of complex experiences.

 

Don Juan is Byron's most sustained masterpiece. Its tone is varied and its loose structure allows the poet to display his gifts as a lyrical, satirical, comic and narrative writer. The poem offers a wide-ranging ironic comment on human passions, whims and shortcomings. Don Juan, though unfinished, was Byron's supreme creative achievement, a poem written in a style so flexible that it seemed capable of touching on every aspect of the poet's mature experience. At the end of 1821, Byron wrote The Vision of Judgement, a satire in ottava rima, attacking George III and Robert Southey. In this poem, Byron rivals his literary idol Alexander Pope, and the imaginative flourish and iconoclastic inventiveness of The Dunciad are magnificently evoked. Byron's ottava Rima, however, was more free-flowing than Pope's heroic couplets, and the poem contained flashes of colourful political rhetoric. Byron's approach to religion reflected his romantic insight and he brilliantly mixed theology with politics.

 

In July 1823, Byron sailed for Greece to join those fighting for independence against the Turks. He worked ceaselessly, and in January 1824, he joined the Greek leader Alexandros Mavrokordatos at Missolonghi on the northern shore of the Gulf of Patras. In April, he caught a severe chill; rheumatic fever set in and Byron died on 19 April 1824. His body was returned to England, but was refused burial in Westminster Abbey. When Tennyson, then a boy of fourteen, heard of the iconic hero's death, he said, 'The whole world darkened to me', and he spoke for an entire generation. Byron optimised the new feelings of Romanticism and bequeathed to posterity the image of the Byronic hero, an outcast from his own kind and a wanderer in foreign lands, gloomily absorbed in the memory of his past sins and the injustices done to him by society. Byron is responsible for negating the stereotypical image of the insular Englishman, and he became fully engaged in the social and political affairs of the world around him. As a poet, his distinctive voice found utterance not in earlier poems like Childe Harold, but in such mature works as The Vision of Judgement and Don Juan where he excelled himself as a poised and urbane satirist, a true inheritor donning the mantle of Dryden and Pope. Byron wished to be, and was, both a poet and a man of action. Hence he espoused the cause of Italian freedom, as well as that of Greece. His dual affiliations highlighted the essentially Romantic temperament and made a legend of him during his lifetime — this duality was the core of this creativity.

 

Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

 

The life of Shelley presents many Romantic, distressing, as well as ambivalent particulars. His impulsive eccentricities of conduct, his sudden withdrawals from affinities, his unfailing delight in translating theory into practice, the compromises that life forced him into, the utter contrast between his visions and reality, and the dichotomy between the calibre of his genius and the milieu that he was bom and bred in—all make an absorbing study. Born in Sussex, Shelley came from a wealthy family and his childhood was an ideal one. The life of the imagination, so integral a part of his existence, began early, when he charmed his little sisters with weird and marvellous tales. This was further enriched by his reading of Gothic romances, from where he imbibed a passionate hatred for tyrants and any form of oppression. In 1804, he went to Eton where, even as a child, he was brilliant, hypersensitive and resentful of all authority. These characteristics, together with his physical beauty, made him unpopular in school, and he was mocked and bullied. As a result, he became rebellious to all kinds of discipline and his sympathy for the oppressed deepened. Once, when a tutor found Shelley's room full of blue chemical flames, the young rebel explained, 'Sir, I am trying to call up the devil'. Hence, the non-conformist streak became apparent early in his life.

 

While in school, Shelley began to write Gothic stories of no great promise. In 1810, he joined University College, Oxford and along with Thomas J. Hogg, absorbed the ideas of the neo-PIatonists, the French philosophers of the preceding age, the English radical political thinkers and contemporary natural scientists. His earlier simple acceptance of orthodox religion now changed to a militant rationalism and thus began a prolonged rhetorical war with Christianity. In the meantime, Shelley had become acquainted with the political radicalism of William Godwin, the author of Political Justice. In February 1811, he wrote and printed a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of A theism, and he was expelled for refusing to satisfy the college's enquiries concerning the pamphlet. Returning home, Shelley became more fervently opposed to the tyranny of the king, the Church and the family, and he devoted his life to his own vision of liberty. That same year, he ran away with and married Harriet Westbrook, a sixteen-year-old girl who was unhappy at school. For Shelley, schools were synonymous with oppression. He spent his honeymoon in Ireland, distributing copies of a pamphlet, Declaration of Rights—by hand, from balloons and put in bottles set adrift in rivers and the sea. The marriage bond, tenuous from the beginning, did not last, and Shelley continued to write and campaign on radical issues. In 1813, Queen Mab was published, and its supernatural framework contained his passionate strictures on authority, organised religion, business and on the world in general. Meanwhile, the Godwinian connection had intensified, and Shelley had fallen in love with the seventeen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who was, like Shelley, a philosophic anarchist. In July 1814, abandoning Harriet and their two children, Shelley travelled to Europe with Mary and her step-sister Claire Clairmont and joined Lord Byron in Switzerland. Shelley had developed a close friendship with Byron.

 

Shelley came back to England in late 1814, and sank to the lowest depths of his fortune, hounded by creditors, rejected by Godwin and troubled by the forsaken Harriet. Shelley's acute depression and sense of isolation found expression in Alastor or The Spirit of Solitude (1816), a poem which was, in its deeper levels, undoubtedly autobiographical. The summer of 1816 was spent in Switzerland, and the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Mont Blanc were the best of that summer's harvest. These two poems marked Shelley's progress from the Godwinian philosophy towards a Platonic idealism. In November of the same year, Harriet committed suicide and the ensuing struggle for the custody of his two children embittered Shelley. He married Mary who had already had a son by him, but the suicide, money troubles, scandal and litigation over his children made it a dreadful year for the poet. Yet, at the same time, his creativity flowered and he met Keats, Leigh Hunt and others. The most important poem of this period was The Revolt of Islam, published in 1818. In May 1818, Shelley left England forever and made his home in Italy, where he reached his full potential as a poet. Lines Written among the Euganean Hills revealed his despondency, but in its pictorial effects and structure, it was a remarkable piece. In the same year, he translated the Symposium of Plato, for whom he had boundless admiration. He also wrote the narrative, Julian and Maddelo: A Conversation, in which the characters represented himself and Byron, and Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples. Life in sunny Italy rejuvenated Shelley's spirits, and his poetic career thrived. The Cenci, a poetic drama, was published in 1819; The Masque of Anarchy, a bitter attack on the British Foreign Secretary Castlereagh's administration, was written in 1819, but not published until 1832. Here, Shelley called upon the English people to overthrow their oppressors. Also written in 1819 was the incomparable 'Ode to the West Wind'. In this poem, Shelley's torrential style was curbed by a highly organised structure and a demanding rhyme scheme, the terza rima. The abstract symbolism was brilliantly controlled and made the natural force of the wind into a convincing metaphor for political revolution. The superb ode was conceived and chiefly written, so Shelley tells us, 'in a wood that skirts the Amo, near Florence, on a day when the tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains'. Shelley made use of all his favourite images—clouds, vapours and atmospheric effects. This was followed by his satire on Wordsworth, Peter Bell III.

 

The years 1819-20 were Shelley's most creatively productive. In 1820, he completed Prometheus Unbound, a lyrical drama, where he was at his most prophetic. The political odes, 'To Liberty' and 'To Naples' came in the spring of 1820; The Witch of Atlas was written in August and the two immortal lyric poems, 'To a Skylark' and 'The Cloud', were interspersed with small- scale propaganda poems. The last years of his life were spent in Pisa and alongside his wonderful poetry, Shelley also wrote a few remarkable political documents and essays, and the celebrated A Defence of Poetry, in which he triumphantly declared that poets are 'the unacknowledged legislators of mankind', and he envisioned the poet as a missionary, a prophet and a potential leader for a new society. In 1821, Shelley hailed the cause of Greek freedom in another lyrical drama, Hellas, written in 1821 and published in 1822. News of Keats's death produced the elegy, Adonais (1821). Epipsychidion (1821) records his self-restraint in his passion for Teresa Viviani, an heiress cloistered in a convent. The Shelleys then moved to the village of Lerici on the Bay of Spezia. He produced many short lyrics of purity and simplicity, but no grand and ambitious poem except The Triumph of Life which remained unfinished. On 8 July 1822, Shelley was drowned in the Bay of Spezia, when his boat overturned in a storm. His body was cremated on the beach, in the presence of Byron and Leigh Hunt. Mary Shelley returned to England to keep alive her husband's memory. She fought hard to publish Posthumous Poems (1824) and the four-volume edition of The Poetical Works (1839).

 

Since the Romantics were interested in feelings, not facts, and emphasized passion and ambience over precision and argument, no other form was more suited to the Romantic temperament than the lyric. After the Elizabethan age, the English lyric flourished once again in the Romantic period and found its greatest exponent in Shelley. By nature intensely imaginative and keenly sensitive, Shelley's genius was best suited to the lyric, both personal and impersonal. All his longer poems such as Queen Mab, Alastor and The Revolt of Islam, and his verse-dramas, exhibit his lyrical gifts, but it is in the shorter pieces such as the 'Ode to the West Wind', 'The Cloud', 'To a Skylark' and 'The Spirit of Delight’, that Shelley remains unsurpassed in the perfect fusion of imagery, rhythm and diction. His lyrics encompass a wide range and can be classified into three categories— personal lyrics, lyrics of nature and those of hope and liberty.

 

Shelley saw every object of nature as a separate and individual entity, and his imaginative vision penetrated beyond the external phenomena to create myths around these objects. Hence, to him, the cloud, the west wind and the skylark were all endowed with a life of their own. Shelley's mythopoetic imagination enabled him to conceive these objects of nature with distinct individuality and to describe them in human terms. Modem Shelleyans rate lyrics such as 'The Sensitive Plant', 'To a Skylark' and 'Ode to the West Wind' as tantalising displays of certain key myths, ideas and images. In poems like the 'Ode to the West Wind', Shelley exploited the evocative power of myths, to reach out to his readers at a universal as well as primal level of thought, emotion and experience.

 

Shelley's colourful life and his achievements as a lyric poet obscured the central aspects of his art. To him, there was no essential distinction between poetry and politics. His work revitalised the radical tendencies of early Romanticism, and he used his poetry as a critique of social injustice. In the same vein as Karl Marx much later, Shelley anticipated the role played by law and religion in the functioning of the state, and forever advocated the spontaneous growth of the human personality. His great visionary poems were always illuminated by a painful awareness of the debilities caused by social and political bondage. Everywhere in his poetry, he expressed his humanitarianism and his fervently hopeful vision of man.

 

Shelley's poetry has been subject to harsh criticism, during his lifetime and after. Matthew Arnold's famous statement that Shelley was 'a beautiful ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain', echoed and carried forward other adverse opinions on the poet. The twentieth-century critics such as T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis and Cleanth Brooks rejected Shelley for, in Leavis's words, he had a weak grasp upon the actual'. Shelley's infelicities were many — excessive rhetoric, abstractionism, emotional coldness of the poetic voice, for instance. His difficulty lay in fusing passion and speculation in his work. Hence, his 'near-successes' are many, but his triumphs, such as the 'Ode to the West Wind', are rare but priceless. Modem criticism and research have done away with the old Shelleyan canon and today, he is regarded as one of the prime representatives of the Romantic dream of the fusion of poetry and life.

 

Keats (1795-1821)

 

The eldest child of a London stableman, Keats was brought up by his maternal grandmother after his father's death in 1804. He went to John Clarke's school at Enfield, where he struck up a life-long friendship with Charles Cowden Clarke, the headmaster's son. He was apprenticed to a surgeon for a short while in 1810, and later went to Guy's Hospital. But he did not practise medicine and resolved to 'rely on his abilities as a poet'.

 

In 1816, Keats met Leigh Hunt, the poet and editor of The Examiner, and before the end of the year, Hunt published Keats's famous sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'. Coming into the literary world under Hunt's mentorship had its own pitfalls, as Hunt and his Cockney school of poetry were disliked by conservative critics. Keats also had to face the ire of these critics. In 1817, Keats published his first collection, Poems by John Keats, a volume containing a number of fine sonnets and an ambitious poem, 'Sleep and Poetry', in which he expressed his own view of poetry and of his poetic destiny. During that year, he started work on Endymion, a long allegorical poem strung fairly loosely, about the love of the moon goddess for a shepherd. The verse was rich and sensuous, but the poem lacked maturity, and when it was published in 1818, it was subjected to harsh reviews in the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine. In that same year, Keats's brother Tom died of tuberculosis. Keats then moved to Hampstead, London, to share the house of his friend Charles Brown. At this time, he also met Fanny Brawne, with whom he fell painfully in love. It was a relationship that brought him little real happiness. He was burdened by his lack of means to support a wife, and above all, by his morbid fear of developing the fatal illness that had claimed his brother.

 

The outstanding achievements of 1818 were Isabella or The Pot of Basil, a narrative poem on a theme taken from Boccaccio, and The Eve of St Agnes, a fragmentary poem opulent in storytelling and in suggestion, and an allegory of young love triumphing over a world of hate. Another attempt at treating a subject from Greek mythology as an allegory of poetic genius, Hyperion, dates from the same period. The Eve of St Mark was left unfinished early in 1819, but that same year witnessed Keats's greatest triumphs—the enigmatic ballad 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' and the reflective odes which have done more than anything else to secure him his place among the English poets, 'On Indolence', 'On a Grecian Um', 'To Psyche', 'To a Nightingale', 'On Melancholy' and 'To Autumn'. In these works, Keats developed a poetic language which rendered his experience precisely and vividly and evoked his sense impressions. They were a fine example of 'synaesthesia'— they revealed Keats's response to sights, sounds, colours and movements at the same instant. They constituted the most intricate expression of Keats's aestheticist approach to life. In each ode, the poet celebrated the sensuous beauty of the physical world, but the experience was rendered more intensely poignant by his constant awareness of transience and decay. In 1819, Keats completed Lamia and the second part of Hyperion called The Fall of Hyperion. Most of these poems were published in 1820, in the collection, Lamia, Isabella, Eve of St Agnes c and Other Poems. This time, his poems were g widely noticed, and in general, highly  praised.

 

By this time, Keats was very ill with tuberculosis. Added to it were his unhappiness in love and his increasing - financial hardship. He was nursed by Leigh Hunt and then by Fanny and Mrs Brawne. But his condition gradually worsened, and ] in a last desperate bid for recovery, he sailed for Italy with his friend Joseph Severn, the painter, in September 1820. On board the ship, he wrote his last sonnet, 'Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast As Thou Art'. By the time he arrived in Rome, he was too ill to work, and he died on 23 February 1821, directing that the epitaph on his grave should read 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water'. Keats's first published poem had appeared when he was 22; he was dead at 26. Shelley's poetic tribute to Keats was the elegy, Adonais, a magnificent contemplation of the tragically early loss of a great poet.

 

Keats's foray into Romantic prose was through his Letters. Informal, chatty and humourous, they give a clear insight into his mind and his artistic growth. Mostly written to his brother George in America, his friends and to Fanny Brawne, his letters are among the finest in English, not only for their discussion of his aesthetic ideas, but also simply for their spontaneity and human quality. They also reveal his awareness of his own spiritual growth, and overall, they encapsulate his passionate love for poetry. Keats's famous concept of 'Negative Capability' —the ability to effortlessly and intuitively identify oneself with the object under study—finds expression in the Letters. Writers possessing this ability have the capability to negate their own personalities in order to perceive reality in its manifold complexity. Keats's letters, mature in thought and feeling, make us to appreciate the essential qualities of the man and the poet, and the loss to literature caused by his early death. The high spirits, good sense and flashes of unusual insight revealed by them indicate that potentially he could have become the greatest among the Romantic poets, and they also hint at his promise and ability to be the master of almost any form of literature.

 

A strong tendency towards Hellenism is a predominant characteristic of Keats's poetry. An obvious reason for this predilection was that unhappy events converged upon him early in life and he withdrew from the contemporary world of difficult experience, to live in a world of antique dreams. Although he was not familiar with the language of Greece, the Greek influence filtered down to him through several channels—from his reading of the translations of Greek classics such as Chapman's translation of Homer; and his study of Lempriere's Classical Dictionary which revealed to him the fascinating world of Greek mythology. He freely used Greek myths in his poetry; the themes of Endymion, Lamia and the two Hyperion poems are a testimony to this. In the 'Dedication' of his first volume, Keats wrote to Leigh Hunt about the decline of Greece: 'Glory and loveliness have passed away.' A year later, in the 'Preface' to Endymion, he reiterated the sentiment: T hope I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece and dulled its brightness.' Another source of his enduring love for anything Greek was his exposure to and interest in Greek sculpture. He took to frequenting the British Museum and in particular, the rooms which contained the Greek vases, marbles and ruined portions of the Parthenon and he absorbed the beauty which inspired his Romantic spirit. 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' marks the coalescence of the two aspects of reality as Keats saw it—beauty and truth, , the beauty of the sensual world and the s truth of the imagination. Keats recreated the scenes sculpted on the urn through the eyes of imagination, so much so that 'the marble men and maidens' of the urn seemed to take on warm flesh and blood. Keats's enthusiasm for Hellenism was also triggered by Lord Elgin's removal of the famous frieze and pediment of Phidias, from Athens to the British Museum. With the acquisition of these marble pieces, the British Museum became a favourite haunting ground not only for Keats, but also for Byron and Shelley. A passion for Greek legends and myths ignited their poetic creativity. Keats acknowledged his debt to Lord Elgin in a sonnet of praise entitled 'On Seeing the Elgin Marbles'. The 'Ode to Psyche' celebrates Keats's affinity to Greece in form as well as in theme. His deep appreciation of the grandeur of Greek art with its wonderful symmetry and simplicity is strongly reflected in the entire corpus of Keats's work.

 

Sensory richness permeates all the great poems of Keats, where sense perceptions quicken the activity of the imagination. The early poems such as Isabella, Lamia and The Eve of St Agnes are almost too profuse, too lush in sensuousness, too decoratively detailed. But the later work, like the odes, is both more brilliant and more controlled. No other poet has more subtly communicated such complex and luxuriant sensations. 'Ode to Autumn' exudes a 'mellow fruitfulness' and the 'Ode to a Nightingale' evokes the senses in a magical manner. Keats declared his poetic credo, 'O, for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!,' and even in his descriptions of nature, he exemplified it to the fullest. He saw and expressed nature through the senses—the colour, the scent, the touch, the pulsating music. These are the details that stirred him profoundly. He loved and rejoiced in the concrete manifestation of beauty that appealed to the senses.

 

Verbal magic, sensuous imagery and beauty of sight and sound are the hallmarks of Keats's poetry. When one reads his poems, one tends, as Wilson Knight puts it, 'to touch, to smell, to taste, to feel the living warmth of one object after another'. However, critics have often doubted whether anything really significant lies under the opulence and the exquisite sense of the luxurious that pervade his work. Some consider that Keats's infinite passion for the beautiful led him to write poems of fantasy and escape, as is evident in 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' and the 'Ode to a Nightingale', respectively. In the final analysis, Keats is seen to be a poet of contraries as he was obsessed, on the one hand, with beauty and the imagination, and on the other, with sickness and death. In many of his poems, a continuous struggle seems to be taking place between a sense of luxurious beauty and the inescapable awareness of human mortality.

 

John Clare (1793-1864)

 

Clare was the son of an agricultural labourer. He was bom in Northamptonshire where he worked as a thresher, farmhand and gardener. His Poems Descriptive of Rural Life appeared in 1820, and in the following year, he brought out The Village Minstrel, a long poem in Spenserian stanzas. Both works contain moving descriptions of the conditions of the rural poor, together with poignant evocations of the old village landscapes and open fields. In later volumes such as The Shepherd's Calendar (1827), The Rural Muse (1835) and the posthumous collection, The Midsummer Cushion, Clare attempted to blend the physical with the linguistic textures of his native place. In 1832, Clare shifted to Northborough, a village just three miles away from his hometown, and he felt completely estranged there. The poems composed during this period resonate with a deep melancholy and a sense of irretrievable loss. In 1837, he became mentally ill and was admitted to an asylum, from where he escaped in 1841. He was committed to the county asylum at Northampton, where he remained for the rest of his life, continuing to write poetry. 

 

His poetry remained virtually unread until the twentieth century, when its reception as a prefiguration of modem or alienated aesthetic consciousness stimulated new editions and built up a niche readership. Clare's peasant poetry struck a responsive chord in the work of poets such as W. H. Davies and Edward Thomas. His charm is essentially his own. As Edmund Blunden wrote, 'There is no poet who, in his nature poetry, so completely subdues self and mood, and deals with the topic for its own sake.'

 

Thomas Hood (1799-1845)

 

Hood, the son of a London bookseller, was apprenticed as an engraver, but ill health made him turn to writing. He worked for The London Magazine, and in 1825, in collaboration with J. H. Reynolds, produced Odes and Addresses to Great People, which became quite a success. Whims and Oddities appeared in two volumes in 1826-27, the first volume containing some of his best- known comic poems. In 1829, he became the editor of The Gem, and the following year, started The Comic Annual. Among his topical verse is the grim and haunting poem about social abuses, The Song of the Shirt (1843). Now principally known for his penchant for puns, Hood had few rivals in English literature for his comic verbal dexterity.

 

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-49)

 

Beddoes was born near Bristol and was educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Oxford. He studied medicine in several European cities and practised in Zurich, but was denied a university position for his revolutionary ideas. A solitary figure of unique and eccentric qualities, Beddoes was often incapable of carrying through his literary plans and designs. His first published work was a collection of tales in verse, The Improvisator (1821). He sought to revive drama in the Jacobean spirit. His Collected Poems (1851) appeared posthumously.

 

Despite his deep interest in the genre, his plays remain unexciting dramatically, and his reputation rests chiefly on his lyric verse written in the tradition of Shelley. Dream Pedlary, one of his most well known poems reveals a mood that is sensuous; The Phantom Wooer is insinuatingly macabre; and the Carrion Crow is grimly jocular. The Gothic and the grotesque are familiar motifs in Beddoes's verse.